February 11 seeding update

Iowa State's shellacking at the hands of West Virginia did not hurt them much in my seed bands.  They dropped below Wisconsin, but stay ahead of Iowa due to their more impressive resume of wins.  The comparison between Iowa, Iowa St., Cincinnati, and Creighton is really close now, though.  

I probably have Iowa much higher than many others do, but I can't help but notice that their six losses are all to the RPI top 20.  They split with Michigan and Ohio State and beat everyone below that level.  They have a brutal Big Ten schedule, having to play all of the other teams in the top five of the conference twice, and are currently 2-4 against that group.  If they can split the remaining pair of games against Michigan State and Wisconsin, and beat the teams they should beat, they're a 3 seed.  

Kansas finally dropped out of the #1 spot with their 6th loss, but they're still a strong #2.  It was close between Wichita St. and Villanova, but while I personally might put Villanova first, I think the committee would go with an undefeated team from what has historically been a good mid-major conference.  After all, Gonzaga got a #1 with 2 losses last year.  

Florida State is now out of the bracket after a bad loss to Miami.  Providence exits following losses to Xavier and Georgetown.  Their replacements are Georgetown and LSU.  LSU is my last team in, and at the moment I think it's between them and Baylor.  

I also noticed that a lot of people have BYU in their brackets.  I just don't see that.  BYU has 4 (!) losses to RPI 101+ teams.  The teams they are competing with have anywhere from 0 (Richmond) to 2 (most of the others).  They have two wins over somewhat solid tournament teams (Stanford and Texas), both early in the season.  Richmond has wins over UMass and St. Joe's; not as impressive as Texas, but then, Richmond didn't lose to a team as bad as Portland. Georgetown has wins over Michigan St., VCU, and Kansas St., with only two RPI 101+ losses.  St. Joe's beat UMass and VCU, and only has one bad loss.  Oregon has no RPI 101+ losses and no great wins, but they did beat both BYU and Georgetown.  

[Edit: I made a late change and switched San Diego St. and Duke.  I had been thinking about this for some time, and I decided that the San Diego St. and Wichita St. have essentially the same resume and should be seeded equally.]


Seed bands for February 11: 

#1: Arizona, Syracuse, Florida, Wichita St.
#2: Villanova, Kansas, Michigan St., San Diego St.
#3: Duke, Wisconsin, Iowa St., Iowa
#4: Cincinnati, Creighton, Michigan, Kentucky
#5: Virginia, Texas, Louisville, Ohio St.
#6: Oklahoma, Pittsburgh, UCLA, Saint Louis
#7: Massachusetts, Memphis, Connecticut, Kansas St.
#8: Oklahoma St., North Carolina, George Washington, Gonzaga
#9:  VCU, New Mexico, Colorado, Southern Methodist
#10: California, Arizona St., Xavier, Minnesota
#11: Stanford, Tennessee, Southern Miss., Richmond
#12: St. Joseph's*, Oregon*,  Georgetown*, LSU*, Toledo, North Dakota St.
#13: Belmont, Mercer, Delaware, Georgia State
#14: Green Bay, Stephen F. Austin, Vermont, Iona

#15:  UC Irvine, American, North Carolina Central, Utah Valley
#16: Robert Morris, Weber State, Yale*, Davidson*, Southern*, Coastal Carolina*

* Denotes teams in first-round (play-in) games

Bracketing will be interesting; two of the #4 seed pods will be in places like Spokane or San Diego, which is probably too far to fly a play-in team from Dayton.  In order to deal with those travel difficulties, you could see a play-in team bumped up to a #11 to get to a pod in a place like Milwaukee or Raleigh, which should be the closest available sites at that level (Buffalo should be taken up by Syracuse and Villanova, though the committee could shift Villanova to Raleigh and Michigan or Cincinnati to Buffalo to accommodate the play-in team's travel).